AI Data Center Boom Spurs Race to Find Power
By Jennifer Hiller | Photographs by Maddie McGarvey for WSJ. Tech companies scouring the country for electricity to power artificial intelligence are increasingly finding there is a waiting list.In many places the nation's high-voltage electric wires are running out of room, their connection points locked up by data centers for AI, new factories or charging infrastructure for electric vehicles.A mad dash to lock up available power has ensued.The tech industry is pinballing from one market to the next looking for places with the capacity to connect campuses that would consume up to a gigawatt of power -- about as much as San Francisco uses. Some requests are as much as four to five times as large as that.In Santa Clara, Calif., one of the tech industry's hometown utilities, Silicon Valley Power, has stopped taking requests for electric service for additional data centers. SVP said it faces transmission and power generation constraints that it can't solve until the early 2030s.AI arrives